North Korea

Africa

This NY Times piece from last month does a good job of capturing the background behind the tensions in Cameroon’s Anglophone area. Among other things, this is an example of a modern conflict in Africa stemming from a weak sense of national identity, due in part to colonial-era borders. When a boundary is created on top of an existing cultural/demographic pattern and without taking it into account, it is called a superimposed boundary. This is almost every international border in Africa.

The Global Crapstorm, Generally

People fleeing war more likely to find shelter in poorer countries, says UN refugee agency. Most of the 3.2 million people driven forcibly from their homes in early 2016 found shelter in low- and middle-income countries, according to a new UN study. Is this a function of national compassion, or lower capacity to enforce borders, or just that refugees may be more likely to flee to neighboring countries which might be in similar economic circumstances? No doubt it will be spun as the first option, but the others are worth some consideration.

Information Security

The House, including its Intelligence and Foreign Affairs Committees, has a serious problem with shady IT staffers. There’s some weird stuff going on. The investigation includes this article, and the six more at the end.

Here is an interesting look at hyperpartisan news sites (known to many simply as “news sites”). I hope this phenomenon gets more coverage. A key quote: “Some of the same people operate both liberal and conservative sites as a way to ‘run up their metrics or advertising revenue’.”

It’s hard to overstate the importance of this observation by one of my favorite recent world leaders, former Estonian president Toomas Hendrick Ilves:

The domestic political goal within Russia is to demonstrate that elections in the West are fraudulent. The government wants to show its public that open societies are flawed, too, so there is no point in becoming a democratic state.

Peace, Democracy, Governance, Accountability

The U.S. supports South Sudan’s national dialogue. This touches on a pandemic I see in the world today: leaders using democratic institutions or negotiations or peace talks to pay lip service to Western values while having no intention of making any real change. I hope to write more about this in the future. For now, it suffices to note that both South Sudan and Burundi currently suffer from intractable conflicts, and the de facto leaders of both regimes are sponsoring peace talks. This is akin to putting Putin in charge of talks between Russia and Ukraine, or making a rapist the judge of his own trial. Certainly in the case of South Sudan, both sides have committed unspeakable crimes, but the point is that a party to a conflict should never be the one to mediate the conflict. US support for this national dialogue is a sign of intense naiveté on the part of the new administration, which will have grave consequences for justice, and extend the mortal danger to many people.

Which form of government is more stable, democracy or autocracy? These days in the US it’s easy to think democracy, but internal pressures (oppression from the government, resistance from the people) are stronger, if less public, in less free countries. A series of maps of Africa shows strong correlations (not causation, mind you) between autocratic countries and … conflict, refugee generation, and food insecurity. It’s not necessarily surprising, but it does suggest that efforts to promote accountable governance worldwide may have more long-term benefits than may appear at first glance.

International Justice

There is a raging debate in Africa about the International Criminal Court. Many of its most vocal critics have argued that it targets Africans unduly and is thus revealed as nothing more than a racist tool of neo-colonialism and imperialism. Aside from the fact that this argument is extremely overused and applied to every dispute imaginable, as our own Paul Nantulya points out in this case it is false, since 7 out of the 8 open cases were requested by Africans, and African populations are mostly in favor of the court (though not overwhelmingly). When it has been effective at all, it has filled a justice gap that many countries haven’t filled nationally yet, and this national/international complementarity was a key reason the idea of the court was first advanced—by Africans.

Not every story has a winner, or a good guy, and in my opinion the Sonyhack story (which would make for a more interesting film than The Interview) has neither. Let’s review the cast of characters.

Sony executives have been revealed as greedy, immoral, and cowardly. While it is not technically a free speech issue, since Sony was not legally compelled to pull the movie (and there are normal external forces that influence how we express ourselves on a smaller scale every day), it is still disheartening to see an American company so thoroughly manipulated. Those who point to personal cowardice on the part of Sony execs and theaters may be right in fact, but as an explanation it is incomplete.

Insurance companies and lawyers, it seems, still rule our lives, since movie theaters knew that showing the Interview in the face of the slightest indication of threat means they will not be covered by insurance, and thus would be responsible if these unsubstantiated threats actually materialized. I think this reflects an odd American trait that we are more willing to risk death than legal responsibility in the face of danger. In either case, the remedy for such a scenario is not simply more “courage”, but a system that incentivizes it, or at least doesn’t discourage it.

The American people are rightly offended at the idea of a foreign government determining how we practice our right to free speech. But let’s be very clear on the distinction between the right and the content in this case. The Interview, making fun of both a murderous head of state with no sense of humor and (I’m told) North Korean culture, with the typical millennial crass and uninformed humor over serious political realities, was a stupid movie to make.

Those who don’t believe in free speech argue by pointing to evil or offensive content. The counterargument is *not* that all speech is good, but that yes, some speech is bad, but it must still be protected in order for speech that is good and true to have a chance. This is not to say there should never be limits, only that we could stand to be a little more aware of the danger to all speech posed by imposing them (whether legal or social) too readily. The resilience of opposing views in western society is a strong argument for freedom; conversely when the other side sees us seek not to persuade but to silence our domestic opponents, they feel vindicated. Freedom takes work, and requires a sense of responsibility. When free speech is challenged, we tend to think of extreme examples, like the right of Illinois Nazis to hold a parade. (Though I think we are changing our collective minds on this; if so, we really should have the discussion outright, so we’re sure that’s what we want.) But if we ask ourselves why we so cherish free speech, I dare say it is more valuable to focus on diverse voices contributing to a shared view of reality from multiple perspectives, informing all but ultimately based on desire to get at the truth. At root, discipline, a bit of prudence, and commitment to seeking truth build the strongest defense of free speech.

North Korea is not justified in doing what it did either, of course. I hardly need to say much about it as a player, except to note that while the details of their capacity for cyberwarfare and -espionage may have been a surprise, their overall reaction – and willingness to take some action in response – was entirely knowable, based on openly available knowledge of their culture and on past experiences. Should Sony have known this, and/or cared? I would answer that at the least, since we as Americans know that our audience is increasingly global, the right answer is not to pretend otherwise. Knowing more about the world is never a bad thing, though many Americans like to think it is. And it’s not an infringement of free speech to allow ourselves to make our own discourse a little more nuanced and informed in light of our global audience.

Then there’s the White House which, despite some conservative complaints of inaction and my own political leanings, I think comes away with the least egg on its face so far. Contemporaneous complaints that the White House has done nothing should always be interpreted as “the White House has done nothing publicly.” Being late to the game in publicly identifying North Korea is not as bad as getting it wrong if it really turns out to be Russia or China. The serious US negligence of two key areas – cybersecurity and counterintelligence – will continue to hurt and endanger us. The list of US failures in these areas is massive, and making them real priorities will take a degree of leadership that Americans on all sides thirst for, but which I fear our current process of choosing leaders is not designed to reward.

Sorry to end on a negative note, but as I warned at the outset, there are no true unblemished good guys here. That’s just the world we live in. There’s always room for improvement, even when you’re a victim.